This Women’s History Month we carry forward the theme of RESISTANCE from Black History Month 2023. We’re centering not only female agency but Black women’s activism, which has always been mobilized in service of the community.  This week we shine a spotlight on the right to vote and the Black suffragettes who fought for equal rights at the ballot box.

The passage of the 14^th Amendment in 1866 has rightly been seen as a defining moment in American history when the citizenship rights that Black soldiers were fighting for was incontrovertibly acknowledged by statute granting them the franchise. The legislation tied the number of seats in Congress to the size of the voters roll, forcing Confederate states to ratify the law in order to regain representation (recall the House gave southern states credit for their human chattel by counting them as three-fifths of a White man, thereby increasing the number of their representatives).

The new legislation nullified the Dred Scott judgement of almost a decade earlier and was a spur to the National Equal Rights League which now pursued the right for all Black men to vote: “it is the duty of every colored citizen to obtain a repeal of any law which disenfranchises him on the soil on which he was born.” Note that the new provision of the constitution extended the right to vote to Black men only, thereby defining the franchise as solely a male privilege.

The passage of the 15^th Amendment in 1869 prohibited federal and state governments from limiting the franchise because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, again former Confederate states had little option but to ratify the amendment. It is ironic given its later history that Mississippi was among the first to comply, leading to the election of the state’s first Black senator, Hiram Revels, who was sent to Washington to finish out the term vacated by Jefferson Davis in 1861.

What about Black women’s voting rights? Harriet Purvis is an important figure in the history of the Black vote. Purvis joined the American Woman Suffrage Association, which was formed by the stalwart suffragist, Lucy Stone, to fight for “women and African Americans equally” and become its first Black president in 1876. A speech by Sojourner Truth noting that “If colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, colored men will be the masters over the women …” resonated with her and the other brilliant Black educators and civil rights advocates she introduced into the AWSA, including poet Frances Ellen Watkins, and Mary Ann Shadd Cary.

The icons of the women’s suffrage movement, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, among many, believed that dismantling the American system of colorism was secondary to the enfranchisement of White women. At a 12^th May, 1869 meeting, Anthony without irony declared: “the old anti-slavery school says women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will give the whole load of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first (Applause.) If intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the Government let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the negro last. (Applause).”

Howard University’s first female law graduate, the brilliant Mary Ann Shadd Cary (1832-1893), was a pragmatic and forceful leader of the Black women’s movement and she joined forces with Anthony and Cady Stanton to petition for the enfranchisement of women in Washington, D.C. Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee, she argued that: “From the introduction of … African slavery to its extinction, a period of more than two hundred years, they … equally with their fathers, brothers, denied the right to vote. This fact of their investiture with the privileges of free women of the same time and by the same amendments which disentralled (sic) their kinsmen and conferred upon the latter the right of franchise without so endowing themselves is one of the anomalies of a measure of legislation otherwise grand in conception and consequences beyond comparison.”